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Fahrenheit 451 By Ray Bradbury

Decent Essays

In the book Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury strongly criticizes government control and the loss of freedom in a totalitarian government. Every citizen is a thoughtless drone in the community with no sense of creativity or individuality. Bradbury expresses total domination through different types of censorship; the act of burning books, the role of firemen, and outcasts such as Clarisse. As a result, a dystopian society is formed and the citizens have no independence of their lives. The first reason Bradbury criticizes government control and the loss of freedom is the cruelest type of censorship, an orderly destruction of burning books. In society, citizens were not allowed to possess any books. In the first amendment, it states that all citizens have the freedom of speech. However, in the society Bradbury creates, the citizens were imbecile, they could not think for themselves thus, had no freedom of speech. Since books gave humans the knowledge to think and read, without the books, they were useless. However, the government did not force the citizens to stop reading, books gradually died out because people took no interest in them. The government then enforced a law to official ban all books. “It’s not the books you need, it’s some of the things that once were books” (Bradbury 84). Faber is telling Montag that books have no importance at all, it’s all the words and knowledge inside the books that is really meaningful. Furthermore, Bradbury shows how the men at the end of the

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